Abstract

The increasing demand for storage and computation has driven the growth of large data centers–the massive server farms that run many of today’s Internet and business applications. A data center can comprise many thousands of servers and can use as much energy as a small city. The massive amounts of computation power required to drive these systems results in many challenging and interesting distributed systems and resource management problems. In this thesis I investigate challenges related to data centers, with a particular emphasis on how new virtualization technologies can be used to simplify deployment, improve resource efficiency, and reduce the cost of reliability. I first study problems that relate the initial capacity planning required when deploying applications into a virtualized data center. I demonstrate how models iv of virtualization overheads can be utilized to accurately predict the resource needs of virtualized applications, allowing them to be smoothly transitioned into a data center. I next study how memory similarity can be used to guide placement when

Citations